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Looking Forward to Lean Kanban North America

Next month I’ll be speaking at Lean Kanban North America. The last time I attended, in 2015, I was a finalist for the Brickell Key Award. I had been helping distributed teams align their work and increase their situational awareness by using Kanban. Jim Benson and I spoke about the positive aspects of that experience, but we spent more time on Kanban’s dark side. We argued it could become an oubliette—a claustrophobic dungeon—in certain circumstances. If you’re interested, you can see the video here. I really enjoyed the experience, and I’m excited to go back.

Kanban for your Brain

This year, I’m going to be focusing on something slightly different. One my favorite things about Kanban is the subtle shifts it triggers in our minds. It’s a huge relief for me when I can get things I need to do out of my head and onto my Personal Kanban. Once they’re there, I don’t have to focus on remembering them, and seeing them set out as a collection of options—work I can start when I feel it’s best—gives me an increased sense of control. I’ve seen the same thing happen for my daughter when she uses Kanban to help make sense of her homework.

Kanban offloads mental processing and reduces our cognitive burden. With a team, this dynamic becomes even more profound. A team Kanban becomes a shared view of their work. At the most basic level, this reduces everyone’s cognitive load, just like my Personal Kanban does for me. But effective Kanban systems will do much more than that. They will become a system of distributed cognition.

Kanban and Distributed Cognition

Distributed cognition doesn’t mean a distributed team. Distributed in this sense means that there is a broad cognitive—or sense-making—activity taking place that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. The interaction of the team and their board creates the potential for more effective and more rapid decision-making. This is especially true if the team has invested in customizing their board to incorporate details like classes of service, specific types of work, and defined capacity allocations. The increased amount of information allows the board to become a decision-support system. Everyone working with it knows what choices to make and what conversations to trigger. When a team gets to this level, it’s electrifying!

Historical Parallels

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. My favorite historical example is from the U.S. Navy’s experience in early World War II. During the confused night battles in the Solomon Island chain, task force commanders and ship captains couldn’t make sense of the situation around them. They had access to revolutionary new sources of information, like radar and very-high frequency radios, but there was no way to effectively understand all the details they provided.

The U.S. Navy had to create a system like Kanban, one that could model the current situation with meaningful symbols, offload the cognitive burden, and help align decision-making. Once that was in place, ship captains had much greater situational awareness. They began to operate as a team and collaborated more effectively. The results were revolutionary.

A good Kanban system will help your team in the same way. Come to Lean Kanban North America and I’ll explain how.